Is Mitt Romney … Weird?

Politico’s Jonathan Martin and Ben “Who” Smith have an interesting piece today about Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, which hasn’t even begun, and it’s already sounding so desperate. The Obama camp “will portray the public Romney as inauthentic, unprincipled and, in a word used repeatedly by Obama’s advisers in about a dozen interviews, ‘weird.’” Is Mitt Romney, well-coiffed automobile heir and consulting savant, weird? Let us count the ways.

Something About Mary–like, he once fastened his own dog to the roof of his car. According to a 2007 Time-magazine exposé, “Romney’s Cruel Canine Vacation,” the former Massachusetts governor “strapped a dog carrier—with the family dog Seamus, an Irish Setter, in it—to the roof of the family station wagon for a twelve hour drive from Boston to Ontario.” He feigns sexual assault. This one is worth block-quoting. The Boston Herald reports:

The GOP presidential candidate, fresh off a win at the debate in Manchester, N.H., yesterday popped into Mary Ann’s Dinerin Derry, where he thought he’d win over the waitresses by pretending one of them tried to grab his butt. During the photo op in front of the jukebox with the poodle skirt-wearing gals, Romney suddenly jumped forward with a startled look on his face, and said, “Oh, my goodness!” For the record, not one of startled servers did pinch an inch. “I would never do that,” one of the tray jockeys told a reporter from Politico. Later, Mitt reported that he “was just teasing” the girls at Mary Ann’s, although it happened for real at a fund-raiser during his last run for the White House.

And, finally, he once tried to comfort a bunch of unemployed people by telling them that he, too, was unemployed, and it is still unclear whether he was kidding. Is Romney too weird for America? It’s a question that now seems so petty compared to the larger issue at hand: is that dog O.K.?